Features/Overview

Card Features

Components Used

How to make it work

Kernel

As of 2.6.12.2, the stable Linux kernel has got all you need. It detects the card automatically.

As a quick test, insert your card and have a look at dmesg output.
You should see all of the following:

The card is detected as Terratec Cinergy 400 mobile (card=47).

A tuner chip is found at 0xC0, tuner type is set to 12 (Alps TSBE5).

TDA9885/6/7 is found at 0x84.

After inserting the card, lsmod should tell you that saa7134, tuner, and
tda9887 modules have been loaded automatically.

If any of the above is missing, you'll have to update/hack/patch your kernel.

The CVS version hosted at linuxtv.org also has all necessary patches. Just checkout the video4linux tree into an empty folder in your home directory, cd to that folder and type "make" and then (as root) "make install". Note that you work with development versions now, there's always a possibility that it won't work or doesn't even compile.

The first line is there so that the saa7134-alsa module is loaded automatically.

The mplayer command line also changes, see below.

Viewers

You should get a clean picture with any decent TV application, e.g. xawtv or
tvtime. However, most applications are not able to get the sound right (If anybody
knows why that is, your contribution is highly welcome...)
If you can set the source from TV to TV mono,sometimes,it works fine.

The best application to watch TV at the moment is mplayer. You could for example use
a command like this (the following part is quoted from a posting by Uros Vampl on the
v4l mailing list):

channels=<list>: The list of channels is in the form of <chan1>-<chan1_name>,<chan2>-<chan2_name>, etc. For example:

channels=E7-ORF_1,23-ORF_2,SE8-Sat.1,SE12-Pro_7, etc.

Video filters (-vf)

crop=690:552: Crop away the garbage that is usually at the edges of a tv picture.

pp=li: Linear interpolation deinterlacer. It has very little CPU usage, while producing an acceptable picture. Look at the MPlayer manpage for other deinterlacers. A very good deinterlacer for example is kerndeint.

-aspect 4/3: Sets the correct aspect ratio of the picture.

The default keys for switching channels are 'h' and 'k'. If you don't specify a channels list, mplayer will switch through all channels in the frequency range specified by the chanlist option.

Sound does not work right away, you need to switch the mixer to line1,
for example with umix:

umix -d /dev/mixer1 line1 R

While tvtime cannot handle sound, you can use sox. Just start tvtime and then sox, like this: